Читать книгу A Well of Wonder - Clyde S. Kilby - Страница 9

Here, in an article first published in Christian Action, January 1969, Kilby presents a brief survey of Lewis’s life and work, chronicling the beloved writer’s life from childhood to his death in 1963. He stresses the importance of his early education, particularly in the discipline of logic, received under the tutelage of the formidable W. T. Kirkpatrick. Kilby’s insistence on the powerful combination of logic and imagination in Lewis is echoed by another British Christian, the theologian J. I. Packer, who has often remarked that Lewis’s strength lies in the fact that “all his arguments are pictures, and all his pictures are arguments.”

If you continue to love Jesus, nothing much can go wrong with you, and I hope you may always do so.” That remark may sound like a fond old grandmother’s, but it was written to a little girl by one of the most brilliant men of our time. The man was Clive Staples Lewis, distinguished professor at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and author of more than forty books. It was written less than a month before his death on November 22, 1963, the same afternoon President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

C. S. Lewis did not easily come to so simple and straightforward a faith. Born in Ireland, he learned simple goodness from his first nursemaid; but afterward, through the influence of a well-meaning but wrongheaded school matron, he turned atheist. His father was a successful but eccentric Irish solicitor, and his mother was a cheerful and wise woman who early started her son off in the study of French and Latin. But neither parent was noteworthy for the sort of deep faith that eventually was to characterize their son.

Nor had the parents two other deep strains that came to mark their son’s outlook. The first was a romantic strain of longing for an indefinable but intense thing called joy. The second was just the opposite—a mind trained razor-sharp in logic. In the course of time the British Guardian said that following the train of an argument by Lewis was “like watching a master chess player who makes a seemingly trivial and unimportant move which ten minutes later turns out to be a stroke of genius.” The New York Times spoke of one of his books as possessing “a brevity comparable to St. Paul’s” and an argument “distilled to the unanswerable.”

The romantic strain in Lewis was associated with the green Castlereagh Hills, which Lewis and his brother Warren could see from their nursery window, and with a toy garden of moss, twigs, and arid flowers made by Warren on the lid of a can. Later this tendency came to include a profound love of Norse legend, the “Ring” cycle of Richard Wagner’s operas, and the entire world of Norse mythology. The logician strain is best seen in Lewis the lecturer and biblical apologist. For instance, at the beginning of his book The Problem of Pain he makes out a better, or at least a more succinct, case for atheism than Bertrand Russell ever did, and then he proceeds to demolish that case. But it should be said that nearly always the romantic and the logical are combined both in his books and in his whole way of thought.

The big house to which his family moved when he was seven years old helped to shape Lewis’s love of solitude. It was a place of “long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.” There on long rainy afternoons he and his brother read among the hundreds of books with which every room downstairs was filled. Clive began early to write stories of animals, including chivalrous mice, and finally set out to do a full, fanciful history of Animal-land complete with maps and drawings.

This happy childhood experience was cruelly broken by the death of his mother when he was ten years old. Her illness marked the first real religious experience he had. He prayed that she would be healed. But at this time he thought of God as a magician who would heal his mother’s cancer and then go away.

Afterward he was taught a more substantial notion of God in the English boarding school to which, dressed in uncomfortable shoes, bowler hat, and tight, unyielding shoes, he was sent by his father. At first he fervently hated both England and the bad food, cold beds, and horrid sanitation of the school. He described his teacher, called Oldie by the boys, as likely to come in after breakfast and, looking over the little group, say, “Oh, there you are, Rees, you horrid boy. If I’m not too tired I shall give you a good drubbing this afternoon.” Yet here he did find people talking about Christianity as though they believed it, and the little boy struggled, yet unsuccessfully, to gain a realization of God. The best thing about his school life was the anticipation of the holidays—the trip home to Ireland and the long days full of play, good reading, cycling, and solitude.

Later in other English schools he learned a love of that country’s beautiful landscape and the raw and brutal tyranny of older boys over younger ones, of rampant homosexuality, of a brash and silly sophistication in ideas, clothes, and women. In short, he learned a system of education calculated, as he put it, to make genuinely uneducated prigs and highbrows. For the rest of his life he never missed an opportunity to satirize this sort of school system as one calculated to fill the country with “a bitter, truculent, skeptical, debunking and cynical intelligentsia” rather than to make good citizens.

In these days Lewis, as college students often do, was living in many different worlds. His private world was still that of “Northerness” and joy. At the same time he was now an atheist and was trying to incorporate his ideas around that pole of conviction. “I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.”¹

Increasingly sick of college life, Lewis persuaded his father to let him prepare for the university under the tutelage of W. T. Kirkpatrick in Surrey. Almost from the minute he first met this man Lewis’s intellectual life underwent a sharp change. The tall, shabbily dressed man with Franz Joseph whiskers met the boy at the railway station, took his hand in an iron grip, and as they walked away promptly pounced upon Lewis for a passing remark about the unexpected “wildness” of the Surrey landscape. “Stop!” he shouted at the fifteen-year-old boy. “What do you mean by wildness and what ground had you for not expecting it?” After further questions, he asked, “Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?”

This was the beginning of a training in logical thought the like of which had not often occurred before. The “Old Knock,” as he was called, was the very personification of reason and trained his increasingly adept student in the practice of a relentlessly logical handling of ideas. Finally the time came when the pupil could stand up to the master. Lewis found that Kirkpatrick was an atheist and was glad to have his own atheism bolstered by that of his tutor, but the time came when the Old Knock’s ubiquitous logic actually put Lewis on the road to God.

Lewis tells how on the first school day the Old Knock sat down with his pupil and without a word of introduction read aloud in Greek the first twenty lines or so of Homer’s Iliad and translated with very few explanations about a hundred lines. He told his understudy to dig in, and it was not long until Lewis was beginning to think in Greek. And so it was with Latin and other languages. Years later Lewis looked back at this time as one of the happiest periods of his life.

His childhood love of nature was continued in the intimate landscape of Surrey with its dingles, copses, and little valleys and with quiet saunters under great trees. He had a happiness that seemed of another world.

By the age of sixteen he had already begun to feel a deep-seated antipathy to the shallow “getting and spending” that occupied people’s lives, to ideas of collectivism, of modern education, of inflated desires caused by false advertising, of slanted news, of built-in obsolescence in manufacturing, and of the whole scheme of “getting ahead” in the world. Even more he began to be alarmed about modern movements such as logical positivism, Freudianism, relativism, scientism, sexual frankness that resulted only in more and worse sexual deviation, “modernism,” in religion and the contradictory idea of inevitable improvement from natural causes, and the increasing feeling of hopelessness in society. He felt that even democracy itself was taking the impossible road of trying to make men equal rather than providing a way for men clearly unequal to live together in peace.

Lewis had hardly passed his examinations for admission to Oxford when he was called into the war then raging. He enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Somerset light infantry, and on his nineteenth birthday he found himself in the frontline trenches of France. Five months later, in April 1918, he was wounded in battle and sent back to London for recuperation. But even earlier Lewis had heard the distant baying of the Hound of Heaven, and now, in a long period given almost wholly to wide reading, he had the opportunity to learn more about writers such as G. K. Chesterton and George MacDonald. Through them the Hound drew nearer and made it clear enough that Lewis was his prey.

Early in 1919 Lewis was back at University College, Oxford. There he met men of high intelligence who were Christians, or at least theistic, in their thinking. One of them, Owen Barfield, was destined to be his lifelong friend. Barfield had read, said Lewis, all the right books but had got the wrong things out of them. Lengthy and warm debates with Barfield and others forced him to a careful reexamination of the foundations of his atheism. Meanwhile Lewis went on to highest honors, taught for a year at University College, and then was chosen a fellow of Magdalen College, a position he was to hold for thirty years.

Lewis continued to be troubled by what looked like the finger of God pointing directly at him. On the one side were Christian colleagues and on the other side one shattering experience with “the hardest boiled of all the atheists” he had known. This man sat in Lewis’s room before the fire and finally blurted out, “Rum thing. . . . All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.” So a second atheist was added to the Old Knock in the process of turning Lewis toward God.

Lewis’s account of how God finally came to him must be read just as he puts it:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. . . . I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.²

The rest of his life was to consist of teaching and writing. If that seems a dull business, remember that Lewis’s adventures among ideas were as exciting as the exploits of a big-game hunter or an Alpine climber. He became one of the great teachers of his time. His lectures were always crowded. One of his students said that he had at his fingertips more knowledge than he had ever known in any other scholar, and another said that Lewis had “the most exact and penetrating mind” he had ever encountered.

Lewis’s conversion brought to him the long-sought joy, and soon he was writing books about Christianity. Millions of copies of them have been sold. Though many of his books treat their subjects directly, such as Miracles, The Problem of Pain, and Mere Christianity, perhaps his best-loved books are of the creative variety. Would you like to make a trip to hell and examine its fondest hopes and its strategy for winning souls? Would you care to know the subtleties of Satan that surround you and are intent at this moment on destroying you? Would you care to learn what happens to a particular imp who lets a soul slip through his fingers into the hands of the “Enemy”? If so, you can go to Lewis’s most popular (though he himself did not at all feel his best) book, The Screwtape Letters.

Or would you like to take a bus trip with people going from hell to heaven and hear the earnest appeal of celestial beings for them to come in, as well as listen to the excuses for not doing so? You can hear the claims of people who do not believe in heaven, even one famous preacher, while they are looking at a part of its glory. You can meet the man who has “done his best” all his life and now wants what he thinks is due him. Or you can meet the man who thinks heaven is just another trick of “the Management.” Or you can meet the woman who on earth hounded her husband literally to death in her efforts to promote him in business and society and refuses heaven unless she will be allowed there to take charge of him again. If you would like to observe that, as Lewis insists, people in hell really choose that malign place, you can read it all in The Great Divorce.

Or if you would rather take a space journey, you can go to an unfallen planet and there see another Eve undergoing the temptation to disobey. There a very evil man and a good one meet this lady in her own glorious surroundings and each endeavors to persuade her to his viewpoint. The reader has an intimate and startling experience of what Eden and the temptation might have been like, as well as an insight into the far-reaching and subtle grounds of that temptation. All this is in Perelandra.

Or one may go to Lewis’s seven much-loved stories for children and discover not only charming adventures but also little episodes that put the gospel clearer than many a sermon. In one of them, for instance, a little girl wants a drink of water but finds the lion Aslan (Christ) between her and the water.

“Are you not thirsty?” said the Lion.

“I’m dying of thirst,” said Jill.

“Then drink,” said the Lion.

“May I—could I—would you mind going away while I do?” said Jill.

The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. . . .

“I daren’t come and drink,” said Jill.

“Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion.

“Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”

“There is no other stream,” said the Lion.³

In another of the books the idea that a Christian lives in daily contact with God is suggested when the youngsters, voyaging into a far-off country, come upon a place where a sumptuous table is set. They inquire and learn that it is Aslan’s table.

“Why is it called Aslan’s table?” asked Lucy presently.

“It is set here by his bidding.”

“But how does the food keep?” asked the practical Eustace.

“It is eaten, and renewed, every day,” said the girl.⁴

And we could hardly imagine a finer depiction of the necessity for divine salvation than that in another of the children’s books. A boy called Eustace Scrubb had accidentally gone along on the voyage of the Dawn Treader. He hated the other children and made all the trouble he could. When they came to an uninhabited island far away, he ran off from the group and in the course of events was turned into a dragon. Shocked through and through to realize his terrible condition, he longed to be a boy again (and a good one). In his terror, he remembered that snakes cast off their skins and thought it might also be true of dragons. He got a rent made and managed to slip off his entire skin.

He was happy until he looked in a well of water and found another skin on his body that was just as ugly and knobbly as the first. Again he managed to pull off this skin, but again underneath was another that was no better. Finally Aslan said, “You will have to let me undress you.” Eustace was afraid of Asian’s claws, but being desperate now for relief, he lay down and let Asian take over.

This is how Eustace told the story to his friends later:

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt.

Well, he pulled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt—and there it was lying on the grass only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly looking than the others had been.”⁵

Afterward Aslan bathed him in the water (baptism) and dressed him in clothes, and Eustace never again was the cantankerous child he had been.

A truly fresh air blows through Lewis’s books. Though his ideas are profound, his words are as simple as can be. One American who visited Lewis summarized him well. “You find yourself using his ideas and forgetting that they are his. His mind seems a colossal picture-making machine, and each picture reduces a great and terrible theological abstraction to the clarity of a Gospel parable. He moves in on you, and possesses the stray ends of your imagination, not by the color and fire of his intellectual pyrotechnics, as his enemies assert, but rather by the simple reality of his service to your spirit.” Like the greatest writers, he knew how to take simple things and make them illustrate profound things.

He was anything but a solemn, long-faced saint. In fact, he once said, “I’m not the religious type.” He once went to address a congregation wearing a lounge coat, slacks, and tennis shoes. He had little use for hymns and hated organ music. He usually attended the early service in his little parish church in order to have a minimum of music and sermon. He so ardently loved the outdoors that on one particularly beautiful day he stood outside and dictated to his secretary through the open window. He loved sitting with friends and swapping jokes. It was his “unsaintly” attitude, together with his unanswerable logic, that made him, as Chad Walsh says, the apostle to the skeptics. One of them said, “His books exposed the shallowness of our atheist prejudices; his vision illumined the Mystery which lay behind the appearances of daily life.”

In a BBC address, Lewis said, “All I’m doing is to get people to face the facts—to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer.”

C. E. M. Joad, professor of philosophy at the University of London, said of Lewis, “He had the rare gift of being able to make righteousness readable.” Like St. Augustine, Lewis was deeply convinced that no man will ever find rest until he rests in God, indeed that a man will never really be a man until he recognizes God’s rights to him. The only real face is the face turned in contrition and gratitude to God.

Perhaps his greatest fear had to do with the ease and subtlety with which even a man’s best acts become tinged with selfishness. Though always perhaps a bit more decent than the average man, Lewis says that when he examined himself before God about the time of his conversion, he found within what appalled him, “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.” He saw the necessity for a Christian to commit himself anew every morning to God and really to live the life commanded. “Nothing you have not given away will ever be yours,” he said. Also, “Until you have given yourself up to Him you will never have any real self.” He believed that God calls Christians to perfection and that the whole of life is a preparation for even further training in the next until God fulfills quite literally his promise of perfection.

What Lewis genuinely believed in and attempted to practice was a life of holiness. He saw true holiness not as a dull and negative sort of thing but as something irresistible, and he believed that if even 10 percent of Christians had holiness the world speedily would be converted. One close friend said that he saw in Lewis what he had never seen in any other man—“In Lewis the natural and the supernatural seemed to be one, to flow one into the other.” Lewis did not have many enemies, but some of those he had simply could not understand a man, and especially a man as lively as he, seriously intent on holiness.

The wide range of interest in Lewis is suggested by two letters I happened to receive in the same mail. One was from a Boston wool merchant who said, “I am frank to admit no Christian writer has made the contribution to my own faith and my ability to defend the Christian position that Lewis has.” He said he had given away many of Lewis’s books to people in spiritual need.

The other letter was from a teacher in New Jersey who was reading Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to her third-graders. She had come to the point where the lion Aslan allowed himself to be killed by his enemies to save a bad boy’s life. “The attitude of the room,” said this teacher, “was worship, holiness. The rare impression of that moment will never leave me. When I had finished the chapter about Aslan’s death the room was in stunned disbelief. Aslan dead! And then a child who had read further said, ‘Don’t give up—something wonderful is going to happen.’ It crept through the room and sighs issued. The little people had caught glimpses of the very real, the miracle of spiritual understanding.”

During the last eight years of his life Lewis moved from Oxford to Cambridge, but he never gave up his beloved house four miles east of Oxford. During this period, when he was fifty-eight, he married Helen Joy Gresham and had a little more than three blissful years before his wife died of cancer. His own physical troubles steadily increased, and on July 15, 1963, about three months before his actual death, he went into a coma during which he had such a glimpse of the glory ahead that he was disappointed to awaken on earth. Afterward he wrote a friend that he thought Lazarus was really the first martyr because of being brought back and having his “dying to do again.” No one can read Lewis’s numerous accounts of the glories and joys of heaven without anticipating the abundant entrance this great and good man had into that realm. He was buried in the churchyard of his small parish church a half mile from his home.

One of the world’s greatest scholars in his chosen field and great-minded in all his thoughts, he was nevertheless a man who rejoiced in the simple things of earth and who from the heart believed that God was alive and really meant what he had said to men.

1C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956), 115.

2Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 228.

3C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (The Macmillan Company, 1953).

4C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (The Macmillan Company, 1952), 169–70.

5C. S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 89–90.